


Where to Find Monsters

by Silex



Category: Biohazard | Resident Evil (Gameverse)
Genre: Angst, During Canon, Fix-It of Sorts, Gen, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Implied/Referenced Torture, Not Canon Compliant, or maybe break-it?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-13
Updated: 2018-09-13
Packaged: 2019-07-11 23:20:15
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,573
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15982622
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Silex/pseuds/Silex
Summary: Billy's been through some pretty terrible stuff. Rebecca's still trying to make sense of what they're going through.





	Where to Find Monsters

**Author's Note:**

  * For [HostisHumaniGeneris](https://archiveofourown.org/users/HostisHumaniGeneris/gifts).



> I was never pleased with how Billy was so helpless in the game, that his story was that he 'just shot into the air' while the rest of the squad did the actual killing and then he took the blame for it. I thought it was kind of a cop-out and I figured that this exchange would be the chance for me to try an alternate, far worse, take on it. Along the way I tried to touch on one or two other little details in the game that bugged me.

Rebecca had said that she was getting tired when he’d asked how she was doing. In his opinion that was an understatement, she looked exhausted and terrified, fear and adrenaline were the only things keeping her going and it was only a matter of time before those gave out as well. Still, she pushed herself to keep going until she dropped, which wouldn’t do either of them any good. She’d gotten it into her head that they were in a race against time, that if they just hurried then maybe they could stop things.

That was laughable, whatever was going on was already in motion and had been for a long time. At this point getting out alive was the most that either of them could probably hope for, but still she pushed herself to keep going.

He wasn’t sure that he’d ever been that naïve, that stubborn maybe, but not that naïve.

He would have been happy to let her keep going, but given the situation it would probably get her killed and he’d probably end up dead alongside her, trying to keep her safe.

Leaving to let her fend for herself should have been easy, just a matter of walking away, but that left loose ends.

Except he couldn’t bring himself to. She really was that innocent, finding out what Umbrella was doing actually horrified her. There was no indication that she’d suspected anything, that, as smart as she was supposed to be, she’d started to piece things together and realize that there were too many coincidences, too many things that couldn’t be explained.

She actually did believe the best in people and was horrified when they acted counter to her expectations. That was why she hadn’t shot him on sight, even though she knew exactly who he was, heard what he’d done. She would have been perfectly justified, if he’d been her position he would have done it, but she hadn’t.

At first he thought that it might be out of some sense of obligation, that he’d saved her life so she couldn’t just kill him in cold blood, but it wasn’t that. He could see it in her eyes, the way she looked at him, waiting for him to say something. She didn’t want to believe what he’d done.

So he did say something. He suggested that they stop to rest.

There were plenty of places in the Umbrella training facility that they’d already cleared and none of the things they’d encountered so far seemed coordinated enough to open doors.

She agreed that it was a good idea, so they found one of the larger, more comfortable offices and settled in to recuperate as much as they could.

He closed his eyes and started to doze almost immediately, confident that there was no danger from her.

It was harder for her, maybe because she was stuck with him and on some level, maybe she did believe that he was dangerous.

He only managed to get fifteen minutes of sleep, if that, when she woke him up.

“Billy?”

He reached for his gun before he was even fully aware of what was going on.

“No, calm down,” she said hurriedly, nearly falling out of the chair that he’d been kind enough to let her rest in while he sat on the floor.

“What?” He looked at her, trying to figure out what was wrong.

“I was just wondering…”

“About what I did?” He finished for her.

“No,” she looked away embarrassed, “Well, maybe that, but more about Umbrella. How could they do something like this?”

From his point of view that was an easy question to answer. They had money, they had influence, there was nothing to stop them and they were set to make money off of it, so why wouldn’t they? The fact that some of the documents they’d come across and Rebecca had insisted on reading, suggested that at least some of the researchers, Marcus included, believed that their research held the potential key, not just to making monsters, but to immortality, only made the reasoning more clear.

If no one was going to be held responsible for their actions who wouldn’t do whatever it took for that kind of money, or the potential to live forever? He’d seen people throw everything they had away over far less than that.

She was watching him, waiting for an answer.

He thought about how one of the guards keeping an eye on him was quite talkative, had a lot to say at his look of surprise when the truck left the highway and went down a side road that led deeper and deeper into the woods. Apparently Umbrella had an interest in rare blood types or something for its human experimentation and he was ‘a lucky one’, he wasn’t going to stand trial for what he’d done, he was going to vanish without a trace, into some Umbrella lab. The story was all set up, that they’d say he was shot during an escape attempt and died.

It was bullshit, he’d been sure of it, the guy was just trying to frighten him, or something.

Then the things attacked the truck and he had to wonder. Umbrella was big enough to get away with something like that.

Everything he’d seen since then supported what the guard had said and it wasn’t difficult to believe that Umbrella was dabbling in a bit of human trafficking if it was in the business of making monsters.

He had no clue what they’d had in mind for him and he honestly didn’t care.

The only thing hard to believe about it all was the scale, but that might have been part of what made it possible. Who would dare go after a company that big, that influential?

You’d have to be an idiot.

Or naïve enough to be ignorant of the implications.

Like Rebecca was.

It probably never occurred to her that she was probably working for Umbrella, indirectly of course, but an organization like the one she was part of didn’t make much sense in a city like Raccoon until you looked at what the two of them had been though.

S.T.A.R.S. had seemingly been in the wrong place at the wrong time, which was what had gotten them all killed except for Rebecca. Except if you took a step back and looked at the way things would have gone if they’d survived it would have been a case of them being in the right place at the right time, not for them, but for Umbrella. The S.T.A.R.S team could have put a stop to whatever was going on before it amounted to anything and the story of it all would have been too crazy for them to share with anyone.

And he knew a thing or two about crazy stories.

Rebecca was still watching him, her expression growing fearful.

“People are assholes.”

And he hoped that she’d let him leave it at that.

“I think you’re a good person,” she said meekly, looking for reassurance and not letting the matter rest.

Best to keep things short and hope she took the hint, “You’re wrong.”

“You wouldn’t have saved me if you weren’t,” she protested, “You would have left me.”

She had him there. Leaving her would have been easier, then he could have just disappeared and started a new life for himself, safely away from his past and what he’d done.

“Umbrella’s doing it for the money,” he said, attempting to bring the conversation back to the original topic. Except that rang hollow. If they were in it for the money they’d have been selling what they were making.

Then again maybe that was because he and Rebecca had ended up caught up in the tail end of things. Umbrella was a pharmaceutical giant, was still making money hand over fist and showed no sign of slowing down. What they were caught up in might be just some small project that had gotten too big and was starting to fall apart.

He’d seen that happen on a small scale and the thought of it happening on a large scale was horrifying, though not unexpected. Umbrella had the money to hide the bodies and keep its stories straight for longer, but sooner or later someone said something that started things crumbling.

“You’re a good person, not like them,” she repeated as though he hadn’t spoken.

“I’m not a good person, I just want to get out of this alive. Now get some rest.”

He closed his eyes and turned away, making it clear that as far as he was concerned the conversation was over.

Because he wasn’t a good person and when you got down to it, no one really was. You could try to be good, try to do the right thing, but when it came down to it no one actually did.

That was why Umbrella had been able to get away with what it had done for as long as it had. Maybe you started out not knowing, but by the time you found out you were probably invested enough that instead of stopping things you just wanted to change things for the better, but changing things for the better was hard and the status quo was easy. Because eventually you got desensitized to it all so that it didn’t matter.

And there were times when fixing things once and for all was worse than leaving them the way they were.

The official story of what he’d done, gone crazy and shot up a village full of civilians wasn’t too far from the truth.

He and the rest of the guys had gone crazy, but the people in the village hadn’t been civilians.

Honestly, by that point it was hard to think of them as people, which was probably why once the idea came up no one in the squad had anything to say against it.

The idea that the fastest way to stop the fighting and bring stability to the area would be to kill the people they were supposed to be helping.

Both sides were probably equally horrible, it was just that he’d seen firsthand what his ‘allies’ were doing.

Even then it wasn’t so much what they did, it was that they laughed while they did it. That was the breaking point, everyone in the squad could agree on that one thing afterwards. If they hadn’t been laughing nothing would have happened. No one would have been killed other than the people their so called allies, later branded civilians, had been torturing.

It happened every time they captured an enemy.

Every single fucking time.

He got it, that the grudges in the area went deep, but he couldn’t imagine doing _that_ to another person.

And the official stance was that they were supposed to just stand back and let it happen because the people doing it were the good guys, or something. Or that it wasn’t happening at all and they were just supposed to ignore it.

By that point the story had already started to get muddled.

There was only so long it could last when one of the guys in the squad had committed suicide because he been ordered to keep driving rather than stop to see if the kid laying in the middle of the road was alive or not. If you got to the point where you could live with that, where it didn’t haunt your dreams.

When the people you were up against banked on the fact that you had some shred of decency, some compassion and used it to set up ambushes it was easy to convince yourself that you were on the right side, that they really were the bad guys and that the people you were helping were the good guys.

Except you got to see what they did with captives and anyone they suspected of helping the enemy.

That one woman…

She’d kept screaming well past the point where she was unrecognizable.

After seeing that it was easy to believe the other stories that had started filtering though.

Because if the guys you were supposed to be helping were that awful it made sense that the guys they were up against were just as bad.

It made it easier to kill them.

Even if they were just frightened kids holding battered rifles too big for them that they couldn’t shoot straight with half the time.

Kids or not they were shooting at you and it was either you or them.

Or something.

Just like he was sure that Rebecca couldn’t bring herself to shoot a person, not yet at least, but she was having no problem with the monsters that they were dealing with, even of some of the zombies still looked pretty human. She was still frightened, but she was already getting used to it.

It made him wonder what would happen if they were to encounter one of the people behind all this.

What would Rebecca do then?

He supposed it depended on how long she had to get used to the idea of killing things that looked like people, how long it would take for her to get the idea that the people making the monsters were even worse.

It was a horrible thing to think about.

He considered warning her, but that would have required him to explain why, after months of pointless firefights and watching people die in the most horrible ways imaginable, you’d do anything to make it stop.

They’d killed them all because it was the only way.

Yeah, the territory they were fighting over was rich in mineral resources, but neither side had the means to take advantage of it on their own and until the fighting stopped there was no way for outside organizations to exploit it.

That had been why he and the rest of his squad had been sent in, to help the side that his superiors had deemed ‘the right side’ and bring stability to the area.

None of the locals wanted stability though. They wanted…

He honestly didn’t have the slightest clue what they wanted.

There were times when the fighting and violence seemed to happen for its own sake and no one could offer any good explanation.

Killing them all was the only way.

And it worked too.

They wouldn’t have even gotten in any trouble for it if not for someone in the squad getting an attack of conscious and confessing to the whole thing.

And dragging the rest of them down with him.

He opened his eyes.

Rebecca wasn’t asleep, she was watching him.

“You don’t understand because you’re a good person,” he laughed bitterly.

“And you do,” she frowned petulantly.

“Yeah,” he shrugged, “I do and hopefully you never do. Now get some sleep.”

Because even if organizations like Umbrella relied on people like her, people too fundamentally innocent to see what was happening right under their noses, he didn’t want to ruin it for Rebecca.

He’d come to terms with the fact that he wasn’t a good person, not when he could live with himself given what he’d done, but he wasn’t quite horrible enough to drag Rebecca down to his level.

If it happened in time so be it, but he wasn’t going to be the one responsible for it.


End file.
